Thursday, September 13th 2018

YouTube Begins Beta-testing AV1 CODEC on Beta Web-browsers
YouTube began posting its first test videos that implement the AV1 video CODEC, which aims to significantly reduce video stream bandwidths without sacrificing quality, exceeding the compression standards set by even HEVC. AV1 provides an architecture for both moving and still images, and Google, which is partly funding its development, foresees a future in which it replaces entrenched standards such as JPEG and H.264. Besides better compression, its key USP is its royalty-free license, which could translate to tangible operating-cost savings for YouTube and other video streaming services.
YouTube developers posted this playlist with a selection of videos that are encoded in AV1. You may not notice a reduction in your data consumption just yet, because the first batch of videos have been encoded at a very high bitrate to test performance. Future playlists (which will pop up on YouTube Developers channel), could test the CODEC's other more important aspects, such as data savings. To watch them, and test YouTube's AV1 player for them, you'll either need Chrome 70 beta or the latest nightly-build of Firefox (64.0a1), which pack AV1 support.
YouTube developers posted this playlist with a selection of videos that are encoded in AV1. You may not notice a reduction in your data consumption just yet, because the first batch of videos have been encoded at a very high bitrate to test performance. Future playlists (which will pop up on YouTube Developers channel), could test the CODEC's other more important aspects, such as data savings. To watch them, and test YouTube's AV1 player for them, you'll either need Chrome 70 beta or the latest nightly-build of Firefox (64.0a1), which pack AV1 support.
80 Comments on YouTube Begins Beta-testing AV1 CODEC on Beta Web-browsers
I think AVC is h.254 which makes sense because that's what my R9 390 can decode, which it was, at 10%. So...???
MPV can do the playback, stutters a bit even if my Ryzen 1700 is under 20% load (with VMware Workstation running VMs and other softs running in the background) videos look like they are sharpened.
To grab the videos in 1080p with AV1
425x240 mp4 container
640x360 mp4 container
854x480 mp4 container
1280x720 mp4 container
1920x1080 mp4 container
854x480 has avc1 (21.22 MiB mp4), av01 (22.17 MiB mp4), and vp9 (18.06 MiB webm)
And I don't care about the plebs. They can watch 360 garbage for all I care.
What about maintaining bitrate? If you have a 5000kbps video, and you have a new codec that can give you the same quality at half the bitrate, why not go with a smaller video? You can only push quality so much. There are a lot of "plebs" who would welcome a new codec that can chop bitrate in half without sacrificing quality. Ask anybody with a data cap and/or slow internet.
What's the matter then?
This isn't progress, it's status quo.
Streaming is a joke and this won't help.
Current quality not acceptable? 25Mb/s bluray discs not clear enough? 4k not enough?
Now youtube is a whole nother mess. Anybody and their brother can upload to youtube. If I started a youtube channel, I could assure you my content would be high quality (at least as far as audio/video is concerned :p), because I don't like to produce garbage, and I know enough about that sort of thing to produce a quality result. There's no standard, no guidelines... if I wanted to I could capture a video of a cool base I built in 7 Days to Die for example, but upload a terrible 100kbps 320x240 video. Youtube also goes back quite a few years. Teamfourstar channel is a wonderful example of this. When they started DBZ Abridged, the audio sucked, the videos were small and of poor quality. As things went on in years the quality of their video (and audio) improved significantly.
If it doesn't have dedicated hardware (or hybrid) encode/decode blocks for AV1 then how do you suppose the GPU will handle it? AFAIK the CPU will do most if not all the decode/encode for AV1, unless my understanding of this matter is lacking.
What logic is that ~ HEVC was late, more expensive & still not nearly as popular (as it should've been) wrt h.264?
Remind me why a freer/better alternative to HEVC is bad ~ because that's what my argument is!